‘I know you don’t want to hear it, but I do love you all, you know?’ she said and watched them roll their eyes at each other and pretend to be sick with a feeling her real world had just slotted back into place.
Anything else was only a dream, yet wasn’t the pain supposed to stop if you told it not to be real? How could something as insubstantial as a dream still hurt as if part of her had fallen off a cliff and been bruised and battered half to death?
‘We know, and we do you too,’ Toby said as if to get it out of the way in as few words as he could on behalf of all of them.
‘We decided to show you our secret to make you feel better about whatever it is you feel miserable about, Poll,’ Hal informed her solemnly, and the parent she had tried to be for the past seven years pricked up her ears and worried about what that might be. ‘It’s all right, it’s nothing bad. We didn’t want to tell anyone about it, but since a man’s going to come and set the castle right very soon, or at least so Lord Mantaigne says, you might as well know about it before everyone else does.’
‘I agree,’ Josh said solemnly, and Polly wondered if letting them sleep in the men’s quarters in the ancient castle keep had been such a good idea after all. It might have made them more independent, but apparently it had also left them free to wander about the rest of the empty and maybe dangerous old house whenever they felt like it.
‘Where is it then?’ she asked warily.
‘We’ll have to show you or you won’t understand properly,’ Hal said with a look that said it wouldn’t be much of a surprise if they told her where it was and Polly concluded her middle brother could sometimes be a bit too clever for his own good.
‘Come on, Poll, the doors will be locked and everyone supposed to be in bed if we don’t hurry and we need to know what to do about it anyway,’ Josh said with a defiant look for his bigger brother as if that was an argument they had long been having with each other.
‘Very well,’ she said, for they might as well get it out of the way so she could tell Mr Peters who would inform his employer about whatever small niche the two of them had found in this once-great fortress.
‘It’s as well you aren’t wearing skirts tonight,’ Hal said with an approving glance at the breeches and jacket she’d put back on for some obscure reason even she couldn’t understand when she came up here to brood alone over what was and what ought to be and wasn’t.
‘Most brothers would be glad to see their sister ape the lady.’
‘We’re not most brothers and you’re not most sisters,’ Hal said, and Josh just looked puzzled by the whole idea she could be anything else but what she was—their big sister.
‘Got them at last,’ Peters murmured as soon as he caught the sound of a latch snick very softly into place somewhere on the other side of the wide hall he might have admitted finding echoing and ghostly in the last dying rays of daylight under threat of torture.
‘Quiet,’ Tom cautioned him and went back to waiting for whoever was haunting his dusty mansion to walk into his trap. ‘What the devil?’ he muttered a few moments later when unexpectedly light footsteps walked down the hallway as if they had no great need to hide their presence and a right to be here.
‘Who goes there?’ Peters allowed himself to challenge them as some boyhood part of him must have longed to all his life.
‘We do,’ Josh Trethayne’s voice sang happily back at them, ‘and what are you doing sitting here in the dark all alone like Polly was until we went and got her, Mr Peters?’ he asked as brightly as if they’d met at a summer picnic.
‘Confound it,’ Tom cursed quietly to Peters because it was either that or bellow at them like a choleric squire. ‘Why the devil must they choose tonight to roam about my house in the dark?’ he added and opened up the shutter on his dark lantern to light up the three young Trethaynes nearest to them, then raised it to inspect their sister by directing the beam of candle on her unconventional breeches and spencer jacket.
‘Lost something?’ he drawled as if he had the right, but how could she simply stroll in here with her little brothers in tow as if that fiasco his first night here had never happened?
‘No, have you?’ she asked with a dignified lift of her chin Peters seemed to admire rather more than he did just at the moment.
‘My patience,’ Tom muttered under his breath, racking his brains for a way of getting them back into the older and safer part of the castle without giving away the fact he and Peters were here for a purpose. ‘But it’s getting darker by the minute and surely those two urchins of yours ought to be in bed by now?’ he made himself say as lightly as if they had met in the everyday rooms as a matter of course. He’d never thought himself much of an actor until that moment and was even quite proud of his unexpected skill, until she sniffed as if to inform him she wasn’t a fool and anyway, she was the one who decided when and where her brothers went and not him.
‘We’ve come to show Polly the secret room to cheer her up,’ Josh said happily.
‘What secret room?’ Tom made himself ask casually.
‘Unfair, my lord,’ Polly Trethayne rebuked him, ‘Josh is seven years old and not yet up to playing your games.’
‘Yes, I am, Poll, and anyway I’m nearly eight.’
‘Do you think you could postpone this particular argument until another day or take it somewhere else?’ Peters asked wearily, nodding at the uncovered window of the lantern to remind Tom they were lying in wait for villains, not four people they already knew were at Dayspring and probably knew it better than either of them.
‘Aye, will you please return to your part of the castle if I promise to tell you exactly what happens here afterwards?’ he heard himself plead and wondered where the occasionally haughty Marquis of Mantaigne had disappeared to for a fleeting moment, then found he didn’t much regret him.
‘No,’ all four Trethaynes replied at the same time.
‘Then we must abandon the hunt, Peters,’ he said, straightening up and scowling at Peters as if it was his fault, since he could hardly take his fury out on three boys and a militantly oblivious female, however richly they deserved it.
‘That you must not,’ Polly said with an offended glare he ought to have learnt to expect by now. ‘Hal will make sure Josh keeps quiet and Toby and I can mind our own tongues, thank you very much,’ she told him and folded her arms across her chest to make it doubly clear to him she wasn’t going anywhere.
Tom bit back a full-blooded curse for the benefit of her brothers rather than Polly Trethayne and let himself admit he admired her daring nearly as much as he wanted to curse her for putting so much as a hair on her head in danger. How the devil had that happened? He eyed her through the gloom and ran a series of images of her through his head, from the moment he first looked up to see her looming in the stable-doorway to the delicious, delirious experience of kissing her with every inch of him one long agonised scream of frustrated arousal this afternoon.
Was it even possible Thomas Banburgh had fallen in love? And with possibly the least suitable potential marchioness he could find in the entire kingdom while he was about it? Clearly it was impossible, yet somehow or another there it still was, as real and alive as if he’d written it all over the walls of his own castle and advertised it in the Strand.
Stunned by the certainty that if he never set eyes on her again after today his life would be lived in twilight, he felt as if he was floundering in the face of the storm of powerful emotions running through him like a natural disaster. He loved her? Yes, he did love her. Tom Banburgh, who didn’t want to either love or be loved, loved Polly Trethayne with all the hope and joy he hadn’t dared feel so fully since he was